First Love

About this title

This Netflix original series follows Yae Noguchi and Harumichi Namiki, each other's first love in high school in Hokkaido, across some 20 years, moving between three periods: the late 1990s, the 2000s and the present, in an original drama with no source material inspired by Hikaru Utada's songs "First Love" (1999) and "初恋" (Hatsukoi, 2018).

Netflix was responsible for the original concept, planning and production, with C&I Entertainment as the production company. After the production was announced in December 2020, all 9 episodes were released worldwide at once on November 24, 2022. The project started when Kaata Sakamoto, an executive producer at Netflix Japan, took a taxi in the winter of 2018 in which "First Love" was playing loudly. When he asked the driver whether passengers ever asked him to turn the volume down, the driver replied that with Hikaru Utada's songs, people actually asked him to turn it up; since "初恋" (Hatsukoi) happened to come out that same year, Sakamoto said, he conceived a love story linking the two songs. Utada has provided songs for many dramas and films over the years, but this was the first original drama inspired by her own songs. Filming took place in two stretches, from April to September 2021 and from December 2021 to March 2022, at about 250 locations in 10 prefectures, from the Okhotsk region of Hokkaido to Hofu in Yamaguchi Prefecture. The score is by Taisei Iwasaki.

Yuri Kanchiku directed and wrote the series on her own. Born in 1982, she sent a screenplay to director Shunji Iwai while studying at Nihon University College of Art and later studied under him, and she made her debut in 2004 as the writer of the radio drama ラッセ・ハルストレムがうまく言えない (I Can't Quite Say "Lasse Hallström"). In 2009 she directed her first feature film, My Rainy Days (天使の恋), starring Nozomi Sasaki, and she won a Special Jury Prize at the 2013 Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival for A Case of Eggs (ケランハンパン). This is the first Netflix production she has directed. Kanchiku is in the same school year as Hikaru Utada; she has said that when Utada debuted she felt "our era had begun," and that the idea of portraying the 20 years from "First Love" to "初恋" as 20 years in the lives of two protagonists came to her naturally. She also said that while writing the script she kept the lyrics of "Automatic," "First Love" and "初恋" up on three monitors in her workroom, and came to feel that these songs sing of the body's reactions rather than the mind's. The producer is Kasumi Yao.

Hikari Mitsushima plays Yae, who dreamed of becoming a flight attendant, and Takeru Satoh plays Harumichi, who became an Air Self-Defense Force pilot but now follows a different path. Rikako Yagi and Taisei Kido play the two in their teens, and because each character is divided between actors by age, there are no scenes in which all four actors appear together. In episode 1, the present-day Yae drives a taxi in Sapporo, and Harumichi works as a security guard at an office building. Having happened to see Yae driving a taxi, Harumichi listens in on taxi radio traffic in episode 2 and finds out which company she works for. Episode 2 also introduces Harumichi's fiancée, counselor Tsunemi Arikawa (Kaho), and as Yae's son Tsuzuru (Towa Araki) becomes involved, the two run into each other in an unexpected place. Gaku Hamada plays Otaro Urabe, Yae's colleague at the taxi company; Minami plays Harumichi's younger sister, Yu; Akiyoshi Nakao plays Harumichi's old friend Bonji; and Aoi Yamada plays Uta Komori, a dancer whom Tsuzuru meets. Osamu Mukai, Arata Iura and Kyoko Koizumi also appear.

In a conversation released with the production announcement, Takeru Satoh called Kanchiku "a genius" and said he was drawn in by the beauty of the script's details and of every line of dialogue. He had worked with Kanchiku in his teens. Hikari Mitsushima said she initially went to hear about the project half in doubt, but the team's passion came through so strongly that she was in tears on the way home, and that it was she who suggested Satoh for the role of Harumichi. Kanchiku recalled that the producer visited Mitsushima three days in a row before she agreed, and that as late as the second day Mitsushima had been "89% intending to turn it down." At the premiere event held at Roppongi Hills Arena in Tokyo on November 21, 2022, three days before release, Kanchiku expressed her thanks, saying the story was able to begin because Hikaru Utada said yes. In the weekly Top 10 published by Netflix, the series stayed in the top 10 of the non-English TV list for 3 consecutive weeks, peaking at No. 5 in the week of November 28–December 4, 2022 (12.3 million hours viewed). In the TV list for Japan, it ranked No. 1 for 4 consecutive weeks from its first week and stayed in the top 10 for 14 weeks in total. After the drama's release, "First Love" itself drew renewed attention, reaching No. 7 on the Billboard Japan Hot 100 announced on December 14, 2022.

Drama Lineup editors · Fact-checked against: netflix.com, Japanese Wikipedia, cinematoday.jp, sonymusic.co.jp, realsound.jp, about.netflix.com, lee.hpplus.jp · 2026-10-14